


keeps me up until the dawn.

by redhoods



Series: beast of gautier. [7]
Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Alternate Universe - Werewolf, Fire Emblem: Three Houses Blue Lions Route, Hurt/Comfort, Injury, M/M, Post-Timeskip | War Phase (Fire Emblem: Three Houses), Reunions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-02
Updated: 2020-10-02
Packaged: 2021-03-07 20:47:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26773876
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redhoods/pseuds/redhoods
Summary: Sylvain had wanted to come here, just on the off chance that someone else might show. And Felix had protested for the first few weeks, in correspondence with Ingrid and Annette, in letters and in person with Sylvain, but he’d wanted to come as well.They’re losing the war and this might be it.
Relationships: Felix Hugo Fraldarius/Sylvain Jose Gautier
Series: beast of gautier. [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1514861
Comments: 10
Kudos: 81





	keeps me up until the dawn.

**Author's Note:**

> hard to believe it's been a whole damn year since i started this series but here we go fictober 2020. late day one - sacrifice.
> 
> there's a tiny bit of body horror in sylvain's shifts, but nothing untypical of werewolf transformation bits from tv shows, i think?
> 
> once again, another time jump and i still gotta go back and do the others, but this one has been at me like a man possessed. i just wrote this in less than two hours and it's not beta'd or anything so. sorry.
> 
> title is from white nights by oh land.

IMPERIAL YEAR 1185  
ETHEREAL MOON  
GARREG MACH

They should have waited.

Felix knows this, deep down in the marrow of his bones, as he watches Sylvain shove his clothes into his pack haphazardly. There’s none of his usual show to it, know teasing grins, no winks. Just his jerky movements as he peels himself out of his layers.

His eyes are already glinting under the bright light the moon is casting, full and low to the ground.

It seems bigger than usual, looming and watching.

Something is going to happen, Felix can feel it in the air, the way the hairs on his arm and neck stand on end. Sylvain does too, Felix can see it in the way he rocks his jaw, rolls his shoulders. In his quiet, when he holds out his pack, now nude under the light of the moon. He’s almost glowing, all pale skin and silvery scars, broad and handsome.

He hasn’t been taking care of himself though, neither of them have been, not with a war raging around them.

Sylvain’s head cocks and he inhales deeply, makes a low sound.

Felix slings his pack over his shoulder to join his own and opens his arms with a great put upon sigh, the only sound he can muster to break the strange silence of the night.

It’s enough, of course it is, Sylvain’s attention immediately snaps to him, eyes even brighter now, that cinnamon brown giving way to a bright gold. He smiles, boyish and sharp, and his movements are slow, long, predatory as he crosses the distance, wraps himself around Felix. The tip of his nose is warm when it touches Felix’s neck. His shoulders lift with his deep inhale and Felix curls his palms over them, feels the warmth of Sylvain’s skin.

He digs his fingers in, clings a little.

Sylvain rumbles a quiet sound where their chests a pressed together, then wrenches back all at once, jaw rocking from side to side, rumbles out a quiet, “Time,” with his mouth already full of sharp teeth. He paces away, though Felix notes that he stays where they’re in eyeline of each other.

It doesn’t matter how many time Felix witnesses this, each time makes him ache, makes him squirm with discomfort. Sylvain says he doesn’t ever remember though and that may be the only blessing to this. The sounds are awful and Felix looks away as bone snaps and flesh tears, puts his gaze on the monastery above them, looming.

A low whine resounds through the area, echoing off of stone and trees and Felix turns his gaze back, finds Sylvain watching him, head dipped low.

Then he howls, loud and mournful, a sound that cuts through Felix, leaves his hands trembling as he shoves them down into the pockets of Sylvain’s coat that he’s wearing over his own. For safe keeping and because Sylvain doesn’t really need it.

And because it smells like Sylvain, even to his human nose.

He knows what Sylvain is mourning for here. Byleth, Dimitri, the kids they used to be.

Sylvain had wanted to come here, just on the off chance that someone else might show. And Felix had protested for the first few weeks, in correspondence with Ingrid and Annette, in letters and in person with Sylvain, but he’d wanted to come as well.

They’re losing the war and this might be it.

Suddenly the sound cuts off and Sylvain’s head snaps up, ears perking.

Felix isn’t sure what he hears but suddenly there’s a wolf snout pushing at his belly, pushing him back towards the path to the monastery, and Felix stumbles but he goes.

As soon as he’s moving, Sylvain goes ahead of him, moving fast, urgent, making these low little huffing sounds, ears alert. Something about his movements has Felix on edge, has him putting a hand to the hilt of his sword.

And then he loses sight of Sylvain, moving too fast through rubble and ruin, until Felix hears it as well. The sounds of fighting, a battle.

When he gets closer, he finds Ingrid on a pegasus but no sight of Sylvain, and she’s fighting bandits, “Felix!” She shouts as soon as she catches sight of him, a flash of his blade through the air as he carves through one of the bandits, “Byleth is here! I saw them!”

That’s not... possible, he wants to say, but at this point anything may be possible with Byleth.

Ingrid takes out another bandit at the same time Felix runs the last of this group through and she dips low, “Felix, I think I saw—”

There’s a loud shout, roaring that unsettles Felix because that’s _not_ Sylvain.

“Felix, I think it’s Dimitri,” Ingrid says again, urgent as she guides her pegasus over the ruins, Felix moving beneath her, trying to stick to the shadows.

That’s more impossible.

He slides around a corner and there they are, Byleth, looking the exact same as they had five years ago, cutting through bandits with that same sort of ease. And only a few paces from them, a behemoth in Blaiddyd blue.

His chest constricts tight, but he’s got other things to focus on first, like finding Sylvain.

A flash of red out of the corner of his eye, but it’s Annette and Mercedes, rushing to join them.

Several things happen in rapid succession after that.

A bandit emerges out of the shadows without a sound, two daggers poised at Dimitri, whatever it is that’s got Dimitri’s skin, and Felix sees the massive blur of deep red fur that tackles the thief to the ground. Sees Dimitri whirl, lance swinging down and through, and a whine cuts through the air.

Felix shouts, doesn’t realize it, as he shoves passed Byleth, passed Ingrid who has dismounted, “Get off of him!” He yells at Dimitri, shoving at him bodily.

It’s like slamming into a brick wall.

“Felix!” Ingrid is trying to grab him, trying to draw him back and he snarls at her.

“It’s Sylvain!” He shouts back and she releases him with a start and he stumbles forward, crashes to the ground, “Get the lance out of him, boar!” He snaps at Dimitri as he scrambles through the dirt.

There’s a lot of shouting around him, voices rising, and he can’t hear anything being said as he makes it to Sylvain, hands shaking, sword long abandoned to the ground as he hovers them uselessly around the wolf, “‘vain?”

A low whine is the response he gets and he touches carefully, pets his hair through Sylvain’s fur against his neck, trying to find a pulse.

Ingrid comes down on Sylvain’s otherside, looking pale, “Sylvain?”

“I’m going to remove the lance,” it’s Ashe, though Felix hadn’t even noticed him in the area.

Mercedes comes down to kneel next to him, pushing her shoulder against his, “It’s going to be okay, I can heal him,” she says, quiet and soothing.

Felix turns his gaze, finds that Byleth has pulled Dimitri away, though the not dead prince is staring at all of them, singular eye pale in the moonlight. He looks away, clenching his jaw.

Another low whine and Felix leans over, touching his forehead against the side of Sylvain’s neck, “It’s okay,” he says quietly into the fur, “what were you thinking, idiot?” He adds, drawing on some sort of reserve he didn’t know he had. “If you die like this, I will bring you back to throttle you myself.”

Sylvain whuffs quietly.

“Not without me,” he adds, quieter.

Ashe starts counting down from three.

Felix tries to tune the sound out, shushing Sylvain nonsensically, curling his fingers into his fur. He can feel the warmth of Mercedes’s magic, can feel the way the tension leaks out of Sylvain, his breathing going steady and deep, “Rest,” he says quietly, pulls away and scrubs at his face.

No one mentions it.

That part anyways.

“So... Sylvain’s a werewolf?” Annette asks.

Felix grunts quietly.

“We should move inside the monastery walls,” Ingrid says slowly, looking over at Byleth.

They all turns slowly towards them.

Byleth stares back at them, eyes large and luminous as the moon, before they nod just once, “Dimitri, can you carry Sylvain?”

Dimitri snarls something low that Felix can’t catch but by the goddess, Dimitri seems more animal than Sylvain and Sylvain’s literally a wolf.

Then Byleth touches Dimitri’s arm, says, “You injured him, you can carry him,” with an air about them that makes Felix’s shoulders straighten. It also makes Dimitri stand taller, somehow, impossibly bigger, and he snarls something else but he stomps forward.

Ashe and Mercedes scramble out of his way.

Felix glares at him, “Hurt him again and I’ll put you out of your misery.”

Dimitri glances at him, then beyond him, then back to Sylvain, “I am sorry,” he says, voice low and rough, scraped out, “I did not know, they did not tell me,” then he lifts Sylvain like he weighs nothing. There’s a strange sort of gentleness to his movements, “I am sorry, old friend.”

No one says anything after that, following the broad shape that Dimitri creates as he carries Sylvain through the ruins and into the monastery walls proper.

\-----

Felix does not sleep that night.

The monastery is a wreck of rubble of dust, disuse making it hard to navigate, so they set up as best they can in the dining hall, dragging mattresses from the lower dorms. “It’s easily defensible, until we can do more,” Byleth says quietly.

Dimitri doesn’t join them and Felix is glad for it.

He lays curled up next to Sylvain, who’d fallen asleep before they’d made it into the monastery. His breathing is deep and even as Felix stares at the rise and fall of his chest. Ingrid is closest to him, Ashe on Sylvain’s otherside.

No one’s asked and Felix is grateful for that much.

The shift back wakes Ashe, maybe Ingrid, but Felix can’t care about that as he shifts back to give Sylvain the space, watches raptly as his body contorts itself back to human shape. Someone makes a noise and he’s not sure if it’s him or Ingrid.

And then it’s Sylvain, naked and pale, on the musty mattress, and Felix curves against him almost immediately, “Idiot,” he says with not enough heat, pressing his cheek to Sylvain’s chest.

Sylvain shudders, makes a quiet sound as he curls an arm around Felix automatically, “Ow,” he manages finally and Felix thinks about smacking him.

“How are you, Sylvain?” Ingrid asks and Felix can feel her warmth at his back, realizes she’s left her own mattress to sit on the edge of his and Sylvain’s.

Someone tosses a blanket over them and Felix watches as Ashe sits, perches on the edge of his mattress to watch them.

“Ow,” Sylvain says again and this time Felix does pinch him careful against his ribs, “Ow, hey, I just got run through by a lance,” he complains, “but I’m okay, I’m okay, don’t give me that look, Fe,” he rambles quickly when Felix rears up to stare down at him incredulously.

“So.... werewolf,” Ashe interrupts and Sylvain visibly sags underneath him.

There’s silence for a few long minutes and Felix resettles, curving himself around Sylvain, uncaring that anyone else is witnessing him like this. He needs it, the steady thrum of Sylvain’s heart under his ear, the hand that Sylvain skates up and down his back.

The rumble of Sylvain’s voice in his chest as he explains the curse to whoever is awake and listening.

“That explains a lot,” Ingrid mutters quietly when he’s done and Felix can imagine the wry twist of Sylvain’s lips.

From his position, he can see the way Ashe tilts his head, considering or remembering something, but when he goes to open his mouth to ask, Byleth is there, touching his shoulder, “We should all get some rest. We can talk this out in the morning, assess where we are.”

Sylvain yawns, loud and overdramatic, nearly tipping Felix off his chest, “Good idea, Professor.”

Byleth wanders off without another word and Felix shifts, wrapping his arm over Sylvain’s chest, skates his hand over where the wound had been, now closed by Mercedes’s magic and Sylvain’s own accelerated healing, “Don’t do that again,” Felix warns, listening to the shuffle of Ingrid and Ashe returning to their beds.

A kiss is pressed to the top of his head, “I’m sorry I worried you.”

“ _Sylvain_.”

Sylvain sighs, “Felix, you know I can’t—” he knows, he’s being unfair, the wolf acts on instinct, “—Dimitri is pack, Felix, I can’t—”

Felix lifts his head, presses a kiss to Sylvain’s chest, “I know, I’m just,” he shakes his head, lays back down, “I was scared,” he admits quietly.

“I know,” Sylvain tells him quietly, a hand plucking the tie from his hair, coming through the tangled, uneven lengths, “I know. I’m sorry, Fe, I don’t want to leave you,” he whispers. 

“Then don’t,” he replies petulant.

Sylvain laughs, low and deep, “Okay, Fe,” he answers and then the rumble starts in his chest, soothing in its familiarity and the way it threatens to drag Felix into sleep, especially with the gentle comb of fingers through his hair, “I love you.”

Exhaling, he squeezes a hand around Sylvain’s ribs, “I love you too.”

They fall quiet, Sylvain’s chest rumbling along, his hand stilling cupping the back of Felix’s skull. The familiarity of Sylvain under him, the warmth of him, the smell of him, alive and whole, is enough security to drag Felix under to sleep finally.

**Author's Note:**

> i've missed writing this series. other parts i'm still thinking about: the ball, more stuff from those five years, how they got together finally, etc.
> 
> i'm on twitter [@vowofenmity](https://twitter.com/vowofenmity)


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